Archive for the ‘Younger Generation’ Category

Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago, wrote a good article for The Baffler about the connection between low wages, high youth unemployment and older people (such as himself) being unwilling to retire.

Thomas Geoghegan

A reporter asked Pope Francis to name the single biggest evil in the world. Secularism? No. Abortion? Not even. Here’s what he said: “Youth unemployment—and the abandonment of the elderly.”

OK, that’s two evils. But aren’t they really one thing? Unable to get a start, boomerang kids move back home—while their grandparents hang on to their jobs.

Why hang on? They fear being abandoned. They didn’t save. The young have always had to wait for the old to retire in order to move up a notch, but in the twenty-first century, that wait is getting longer, increasing the competition for scarce jobs.

For the state to shrink, the old must work more. It’s a neoliberal axiom. Call it the New Old Deal.

As a labor lawyer, let me defend my clients. The working-class people I represent are dying sooner, not mucking up the labor market by living too long. Alcohol and heroin are partially to blame, and trending stories on epidemics afflicting the white working class make easy fodder for TV newsmagazines.

But let me tell you what I more often see happening to non-college whites: those who do hard physical labor for an hourly wage go lame. By age fifty-five, or certainly sixty, many are just done.

And when they go lame, they have no options. They have no union-bargained pensions anymore. They certainly have no 401(k) retirement accounts.

Maybe the country should be grateful; to the extent that they die prematurely, they help shore up Social Security. And hey, should the GOP make it harder for them to receive workers’ comp or disability, these high school grads may die even younger.

The whole article is worth reading. Click on Exit Planning to read it.

Sharp increases in rents along with stagnant incomes over the past five years have helped create a dire situation for many of the country’s renters. A new report shows how those trends have actually been playing out for more than five decades.

Inflation-adjusted rents have risen by 64% since 1960, but real household incomes only increased by 18% during that same time period, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data released by Apartment List, a rental listing website.

Renters fared the worst during the decade between 2000 and 2010, when inflation-adjusted household incomes fell by 9%, while rents rose by 18%, according to Apartment List. That is likely because there were two recessions during that time and a housing bust in 2008 that drove millions of homeowners into renting.

The takeaway: The United States has grown much less affordable for renters for half a century and, barring a major change, is likely to continue doing so.

If Donald Trump is the candidate of angry white men and Hillary Clinton is the candidate of women, Bernie Sanders is the candidate of the young.

Across demographic groups, public opinion polls show a majority of voters under 30 support Sanders.

This is partly because younger Americans live in a more unforgiving world than I did when I was their age, and they have a stronger desire for change.

I think there is another reason. Someone who is 19 or 29 should have a longer time horizon than I do at age 79.

My circle of friends consists mostly of liberal Democrats in my age group. For them, the big question is: What would happen if Donald Trump is elected?

A younger person might ask: What would happen if we have eight more years of war and economic decline? What if things go on as they are now for decades?

I think of global climate change as a problem for a future I probably won’t live to see. Millennials can expect to see California run out of water and Miami sink beneath the waves in their lifetimes.

A Millennial voter would be more concerned than somebody in my generation—I feel silly calling myself a member of the Greatest Generation—about building the long-range future than about winning the next election.

Clinton is a defender of the status quo. Trump is a voice for anger and frustration. Of the three, only Sanders represents hope for the future.

Aviva Chomsky wrote a good article for TomDispatch about the anti-racism movement on college campuses. She discussed how it has come to focus on individual change rather than societal change, and is thereby less threatening to the powers that be.

In some of their most dramatic actions, students of color, inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, have challenged the racial climate at their schools.

In the process, they have launched a wave of campus activism, including sit-ins, hunger strikes, demonstrations, and petitions, as well as emotional, in-your-face demands of various sorts.

Aviva Chomsky

One national coalition of student organizations, the Black Liberation Collective, has called for the percentage of black students and faculty on campus to approximate that of blacks in the society.

It has also called for free tuition for black and Native American students, and demanded that schools divest from private prison corporations.

Other student demands for racial justice have included promoting a living wage for college employees, reducing administrative salaries, lowering tuitions and fees, increasing financial aid, and reforming the practices of campus police.

These are not, however, the issues that have generally attracted the attention either of media commentators or the colleges themselves.

Instead, the spotlight has been on student demands for cultural changes at their institutions that focus on deep-seated assumptions about whiteness, sexuality, and ability.

At some universities, students have personalized these demands, insisting on the removal of specific faculty members and administrators.

Emphasizing a politics of what they call “recognition,” they have also demanded that significant on-campus figures issue public apologies or acknowledge that “black lives matter.”

Some want universities to implement in-class “trigger warnings” when difficult material is being presented and to create “safe spaces” for marginalized students as a sanctuary from the daily struggle with the mainstream culture.

By seizing upon and responding to these (and only these) student demands, university administrators around the country are attempting to domesticate and appropriate this new wave of activism.

The good news for Bernie Sanders is that he gets a larger share than any other candidate of votes of people under age 30. The bad news is that younger voters do not turn out in large numbers, compared to older voters, and that Sanders’ advantage with voters under 30 is shrinking as the primary season goes on.

Young voters vote for Democrats by large majorities—when they vote. The question for the Democrats is whether any candidate will generate enough enthusiasm among Millennials to make a difference.

As Chuck Bodd pointed out on Daily Kos, voters under 30 gave Barack Obama his margin of victory in both 2008 and 2012. My own opinion, like Bodd’s, is that Bernie Sanders is the only Democratic candidate with a chance of doing that.

The difference between Sanders and Obama was that Obama was the candidate supported by idealistic young people, but he also was the candidate of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. When forced to choose, he went with Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Alex Small, a physics professor, is frustrated with white, middle-class college students who can’t write grammatically correct English.

I’m in a dark mood from grading. If I have to constantly correct errors of subject-verb agreement in papers written by native English speakers from the majority ethnic/racial group, then higher education is pretty much doomed. I’m emphasizing their ethnic majority status because we can’t blame this on some sort of disadvantage. [snip]

Alex Small

The dominant group will periodically allow some sort of largess by which “those people” get their “special program” and if they still don’t succeed then the dominant group can write them off with a clear conscience. And if they do succeed, the dominant group can put an asterisk on their success, because they obviously only got there thanks to the “special program” (an asterisk that will make some seethe with resentment while others pat themselves on the back).

However, the dominant group will never tolerate their own kids being treated with benevolent condescension. Good middle-class kids from the dominant group can’t possibly be failing, because their kids are (by definition) the measure of success for the mainstream. Their kids will get degrees. Period.

I usually dislike the term “white privilege” because it implies people getting something they shouldn’t have. Not being scared when you’re stopped by police isn’t a privilege. It’s how everybody should be able to feel.

But the term does apply here, although maybe “upper middle-class suburban privilege” might be more exact.

No adult taught me how to play tag or dodge ball or Quaker meeting [1] or hide and go seek or even baseball. I learned them all from other children.

I learned the rules of fair play from other children. All games have rules. If you didn’t play by the rules, other kids wouldn’t want to play with you.

Playworks supervised play

Now I learn there is a company called Playworks that offers services as a “recess consultant.” It organizes school recess to create “more inclusive and structured playtime” to create a “quality playtime experience” that will enable children to be more successful adults. I am not making this up.

I see two possible ways to look at this—one bad and one worse.

The merely bad possibility is that this is a typical bureaucratic scheme to take all the spontaneity out of life.

The worse possibility is that companies such as Playworks actually are needed—that adults organize children’s time so thoroughly that they literally don’t know how to play, only how to take part in organized activities.

That’s why so many kids nowadays are devoted to their Smartphones. The Internet is the only realm where they can be free of adult supervision.

Now I don’t see any evidence of this on my street. I see hopscotch chalk marks on the sidewalks, the same as when I was a child. I see kids playing ball and doing other normal kid things.

I was surprised at the information in the graph, which I found on the Avedon’s Sideshow web site. Of course the black death rate due to “legal intervention” is still double the white death rate. I hope the trend continues.

How do you expect people to start their careers with a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and then save for a down payment, and then save for retirement? This is un-possible even with high paying jobs, which most people don’t have.

It’s true that the magic of compound interest works really well if you start saving at age 21 and continue until retirement, but it’s also true that it’s stupid to save if investment returns are lower than the interest rates on the absurd amount of debt that you were supposed to rack up to enter civilized life.

Really no one should go into this much debt to go to college, but The Kids Today don’t even have the option of cheap public universities like The Kids In My Day did.

ThinkProgress had a good article about how a sensible American Imam explained to Muslim teenagers that the Islamic State’s propaganda is contrary to the authoritative teachings and the historic practice of Islam.

When people are ignorant of their own religion, they are vulnerable to those who try to sell them a twisted version of it. The best cure for ignorance is accurate knowledge.

The disturbing thing to me about the article is that Imam Mohamid Magid’s effort is necessary in the first place. It is disturbing that ISIS has such a big presence on American social media. The New York Times reported that ISIS sends out an estimated 500 million messages a day via 46,000 Twitter accounts.

It also is disturbing that ISIS propaganda has an impact. I can understand radical Muslim movements with grievances against the United States, Israel and other Western countries. I do not volunteer to become a victim of such movements, nor advocate that others do so, but they are understandable in a way that ISIS is not.

The primary targets of ISIS are other Muslims and harmless religious minorities who have been living in peace in majority-Muslim countries, and the images that ISIS broadcasts of be-headings and burnings are manifestations of sadistic cruelty. This is very hard to understand.

U.S. government officials estimate that 150 young Americans have gone or tried to go to Syria to join ISIS, the New York Times reported. Imam Magid said some of them were no doubt mentally ill, and I’m sure that is true.

Eric Hoffer pointed out years ago in his book, The True Believer, that people who join extremist mass movements are not those who are rooted in a traditional religion, but people who are uprooted from their culture and desperately need something to give them sense of meaning and belonging.

The main exception to these trends is that Americans are slower to get married than in the past and quicker to become divorced. But maybe it is better to be unmarried or divorced than in a bad or abusive marriage.

[Update 11/30/14. Well, evidently these answers weren’t in a GED (see comment below) and, since they’re Internet memes, they may not be from last year. I hope they’re at least genuine answers from 16-year-olds.]

The following questions were set in last year’s GED examination.

These are genuine answers (from 16 year olds)

Q. Name the four seasons. A. Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q. How is dew formed? A. The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q. What guarantees may a mortgage company insist on? A. If you are buying a house they will insist that you are well endowed

Q. In a democratic society, how important are elections? A. Very important. Sex can only happen when a male gets an election.

Q. What are steroids? A. Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Q. What happens to your body as you age? A. When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Millions of people in the USA and other industrial countries are living paycheck to paycheck. There are millions more for whom being able to live paycheck to paycheck would be a considerable improvement.

The people in this second group, “the precariat,” don’t know from week to week whether they’ll be able to work or how much they’ll earn. From the perspective of the elite, that means a “flexible” labor force, which from their perspective is a good thing. But the flexibility is all on the part of workers, not of managers or holders of financial assets.

Prof. Guy Standing of the University of London said the precariat class is growing in all industrial countries. This class consists of three categories of people—sons and daughters of blue collar workers who had secure jobs, migrants and minorities who live on the fringe of society, and college graduates who find themselves unable to work in their fields.

Few of them participate in politics because they’re too busy just scrambling to make a living. They’re divided among themselves, with the children of the middle class sometimes blaming minorities and migrants for their plight.

But they’re discontented, and while their discontent mostly takes the form of violent protest, Standing thinks that, under the leadership of the educated part of the precariat, they could become a powerful force.

A century ago, the Ivy League universities—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—provided an education suitable for those who were born rich. Now they provide an education suitable for those who hope to get rich. This is not an improvement.

The old thinking was that those born into the upper ranks of society should receive an education suitable for future leaders. The universities taught them history and the classics to give a broad understanding of the world. They also sought to teach mental and physical discipline to build character. College athletics were part of the character-building process, not a producer of revenue.

The great 20th century democratic dream was that this type of education should be made available not just to the children of the elite, but to everyone who wanted it and was capable of it. I was fortunate enough to attend college in the 1950s, when this dream was at its zenith, and I received a broad liberal education (with some gaps, due to bad choices on my part). I can’t prove it was of economic benefit, but it enriched my life.

Now higher education has become part of the process of sorting people into winners and losers.

President Obama says everybody should have a chance to go to college in order to advance themselves economically. But of course if everybody goes to college, then a college degree will be worth no more in economic terms than a high school diploma today. An Ivy League degree is what economists called “positional good”—something that is valuable only because not everybody has it.

My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey sent me a link to an article in the New Republic by William Deresiewicz about how elite education has been corrupted by the quest for success. Here are some highlights.

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. [snip]

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them.

Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice. [snip]

Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion. [snip]

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science educator whom I admire, laments the loss of interest in the space program, which he equates to a loss of hope in the future. I can understand that. There was a time when I thought that the human future depended on the space program.

My thinking was shaped by reading science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s, and, in particular, Astounding Science Fiction magazine, edited by the visionary John W. Campbell Jr., and the young adult (then called “juvenile”) and Future History novels of Robert A. Heinlein.

While science fiction in those days was varied and imaginative, there was a kind of consensus future which constituted a kind of default setting and shared background for many (not all) SF writers of that day.

The common assumption was that the next stage of human history was the Age of Space, which would be for the Planet Earth as a whole what the Age of Discovery was for Europe. It was to begin with the construction of space stations and expeditions to the Moon, Mars and Venus, which would soon by followed by colonization of these worlds.

The default idea of Mars was a desert planet with frozen canals and an ancient extraterrestrial race with occult powers and secret wisdom. The default idea of Venus was a jungle planet, something like Congo or Amazon basins and something like Earth in the age of the dinosaurs. Mars was an old planet and Venus was a young planet. Other worlds of the Solar System also were thought to be habitable and ripe of human colonization.

The next step was to be discovery of a faster-than-life drive and the spread of humanity through our galaxy. Human beings would the leaders in the formation of a Galactic Federation, much like the Federation in Star Trek. This was to be followed by a Galactic Empire, much like the Empire in Star Wars. The empire would decline and fall, like the Roman Empire, and be followed by an age of chaos and the creation of a new and more advanced civilization.

Humans, not extraterrestrial beings, were to be the leaders and guides. Campbell was a humanity chauvinist; he had a rule that he would not publish a story in which aliens got the better of human beings.

I didn’t exactly believe all of this, but I did anticipate the Age of Space with great hope and curiosity. I thought this age was about to begin with the moon landings in 1969. I did not realize, as I do now, that the moon landings were a stunt, carried out for prestige, to prove that the USA was more advanced than the USSR.

I’ll say this: I felt proud to be a citizen of a nation with the sense of purpose and the capability to decide to do something so difficult, and to carry it out. But the moon landings didn’t lead to anything. What I thought of as a beginning was the high point.

Now hopefulness about the future has migrated to other nations, and we Americans, to the extent that we thing about the future at all, are very rightly concerned about averting catastrophe—economic decline, political collapse, environmental catastrophe, exhaustion of fossil fuels, mutant diseases, global climate change, et very much cetera.

Maybe there will be an Age of Space someday, whether or not the United States is the nation that leads the way. My heart is with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t want to terminate the space program, either. But the younger generation doesn’t see the future in terms of Heinlein’s Space Cadet. Their vision of the future is Hunger Games.

One of the defining characteristics of Americans used to be that, whatever our circumstances, almost all of us expected that our children and grandchildren would be better off than we are.

This is no longer true. And a Pew Research survey indicates that people in other supposedly advanced nations are more pessimistic than we are.

While 62 percent of Americans expect the next generation to be financially worse off than their parents, this pessimistic view is held by 64 percent of Canadians, 64 percent of Germans, 74 percent of the British, 76 percent of Japanese and 90 percent of the French.

The most optimistic nations in the world are China, where 82 percent of those surveyed said they expect a better future, and Brazil, where 79 percent are hopeful (see below). Among European countries, the least pessimistic was Russia.

I think survey results in China or any other dictatorship have to be taken with a certain amount of skepticism, but, even so, I am astonished at the differences among countries.

Tim Minchin is a highly regarded Australian musician, composer, songwriter, actor, comedian and writer. I’d never heard of him until I came across this summary on the Inspired Acceptance web log of Minchin’s nine life lessons. They are from an address he gave to the University of Western Australia in Queensland on receiving an honorary degree.

1. You don’t have to have a dream. Work on whatever is in front of you. Be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out of the corner of your eye.

2. Don’t seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you may get some as a side effect.

3. Remember it’s all luck. Understanding that you can’t truly take credit for you successes, nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you compassionate. Empathy is intuitive but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

4. Exercise. Take care of your body, you’re going to need it. Most of you Mob are going to live to nearly 100 and even the poorest of you will achieve a level of wealth that most humans throughout history could never dream of. And this long, luxurious life of yours is going to make you depressed. But don’t despair. Tthere is an inverse correlation between exercise and depression. Run!

5. Be hard on your opinions. We must think critical and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs. Take them out on the verandah and hit them with a cricket bat. Be intellectually rigorous.

6. Be a teacher. Teachers and the most admirable and important people in the world. Even if you’re not a teacher, be a teacher. Share your ideas. Don’t take for granted your education. Rejoice in what you learn and spray it.

7. Define yourself by what you love. We have a tendency to define ourselves in opposition to stuff. But try to also express your passion for things you love. Be demonstrative in your praise of those you admire. Be pro-stuff, not just anti-stuff

8. Respect people with less power than you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful Cat in the room. I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful… So there!

9. Don’t rush. You don’t need to already know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Most people I know who were sure of their career path at 20 are now having mid-life crises.